Building on our commitment to corporate governance

TELUS' commitment to full and fair financial disclosure and best practices in corporate governance provides a solid foundation for what we do. We strive to remain a leader in this important area of investor and regulatory attention.

Building on good governance

Throughout 2008, we continued to pursue opportunities for corporate governance improvement. Notably, TELUS remains in full compliance with the corporate governance standards of Canadian securities regulators and Section 303A of the New York Stock Exchange governance standards.

Initiatives we continued to pursue in 2008 include:

• Prioritizing certain desired skills and attributes, in light of the business strategy and direction of TELUS, for Board succession planning purposes
• Preparing for and implementing the new Canadian executive compensation disclosure rules that came into effect at the end of 2008
• Implementing continuous improvements to TELUS' pension plan governance structure based on a consultant's review, which concluded that our governance structure is very sound and compares favourably with other pension plans in Canada.

Building on our voluntary practices

At TELUS, we take a proactive approach to corporate reporting and governance, often surpassing what is legally required for the benefit of our investors. Voluntary practices include:

• Having the Chief Compliance Officer report to the Audit Committee on a quarterly basis
• Continuously improving enterprise risk governance by:
  • Conducting extensive enterprise risk and control assessments and updating our key risk profile and internal audit program throughout the year, which enables discussion with senior management and quarterly status reports to the Audit Committee
  • Enhancing our enterprise risk and control survey to assess perceptions of resiliency and readiness to respond to key risks, and assessing perceptions and tolerance for key risk categories
  • Assigning executive-level owners for mitigating key risks
  • Integrating information across our strategic planning process and enterprise risk assessment activities
• Having an independent third party conduct an audit of select quantitative information in the annual TELUS corporate social responsibility report
• Publicly disclosing, on a voluntary basis, our corporate disclosure policy, insider trading policy and entire Board policy manual, including all of the Board committees' terms of reference. Only the Audit Committee's terms of reference is required by regulation. This information is available at telus.com/governance.

Building on best practices

Our long-standing best practices provide a foundation for TELUS to effectively pursue corporate governance excellence. Some of these practices include:

• Adopting a majority voting policy for the election of directors
• Separating the roles of Chief Executive Officer and Board Chair
• Conducting in-camera sessions at each regularly scheduled meeting of the Board and its committees where the independent directors meet without management present
• Having both the Chief Internal Auditor and the external auditor report to the Audit Committee
• Conducting in-camera sessions at each quarterly Audit Committee meeting where committee members meet separately with the external and internal auditors without management present.